I moved all my stuff to k3s for exactly the reasons it seems you’re describing. I’m not saying “do it” but… it was worth it for me.
I had a ton of stuff that was important to me running in VMs on a Proxmox server. I had backups, but if anything had happened to that it would still be a nightmare. Most of it had been there long enough that my technical knowledge and knowledge of how I had set it up was rusty to nonexistent. Which meant that I was afraid to touch it. Which made me get rustier… It was starting to be a constant source of stress and anxiety.
Now I’ve got single repository that has everything that isn’t “actual user data”. I can (and have tested) taking a couple machines, PXE booting them, and within 15 minutes with no interaction getting to a fresh cluster. Then redeploying all my stuff takes me a couple hours (mostly due to slow internet) with, again, no interaction besides hitting “go” on a bunch of things. And god help me if I forget how Kubernetes works because then I’m probably out of a job too.
I switched to running on four Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny PCs (like $40 each I think) as opposed to a single large box to provide some redundancy as well. Makes things like hardware failures not as much of an issue, upgrades less risky, etc.
I’m not afraid to do things with it anymore. I never worry that a piece of hardware failing is going to suddenly and unexpectedly mean a lost weekend. It’s made it all fun again instead of stressful and like work.
I had a ton of stuff that was important to me running in VMs on a Proxmox server. I had backups, but if anything had happened to that it would still be a nightmare. Most of it had been there long enough that my technical knowledge and knowledge of how I had set it up was rusty to nonexistent. Which meant that I was afraid to touch it. Which made me get rustier… It was starting to be a constant source of stress and anxiety.
Now I’ve got single repository that has everything that isn’t “actual user data”. I can (and have tested) taking a couple machines, PXE booting them, and within 15 minutes with no interaction getting to a fresh cluster. Then redeploying all my stuff takes me a couple hours (mostly due to slow internet) with, again, no interaction besides hitting “go” on a bunch of things. And god help me if I forget how Kubernetes works because then I’m probably out of a job too.
I switched to running on four Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny PCs (like $40 each I think) as opposed to a single large box to provide some redundancy as well. Makes things like hardware failures not as much of an issue, upgrades less risky, etc.
I’m not afraid to do things with it anymore. I never worry that a piece of hardware failing is going to suddenly and unexpectedly mean a lost weekend. It’s made it all fun again instead of stressful and like work.